Subscribe"The US has given up its sovereignity to the United Nations. What's next?" Little known EPA regulation now allows US executives to be extradicted and tried for "ecological crimes" in a European courtroom. Stop The UN website here....would be an acceptable post? (First link to a right-wing blog, second link to an a right-wing activist website.) Is this what you want to see on the front page of MetaFilter every day? If the answer is "no", then is it fair to think so when the only difference is the politcs of the post?
As the founder of 1-800-SUICIDE I would like to respond to the posts that have appeared on this site.
First off, the issue of the GLBT was not as a result our efforts. This was done by a few bloggers who made the connection because of the SAMHSA efforts to remove GLBT references on a recent conference. We totally support Ron Bloodworth and the effort he and the GLBT community made to save the right to include GLBT language into the title of a workshop about GLBT issues. We know as well that the GLBT community is at a much higher risk for suicide than many other communities and support all efforts to prevent suicide in this underserved community. While this issue is very important, the issue we hope this community will focus on is the issue of the immediate risk of the feds taking over 1-800-SUICIDE and having access to the callers’ personal data.
To the issue about the competing suicide hotline known as the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline 800-273-TALK there’s much to say. On June 28th 2000, Congress passed legislation that funded 1-800-SUICIDE. At no time did Congress authorize SAMHSA to create much less duplicate an existing hotline network (at the time when the legislation was passed 1-800-SUCIDE had already existed and was funded by the money that I personally invested into it from the sale of my home and the insurance benefits I received from Kristin’s death). That is one of our core issues. 1-800-SUICIDE has been around for 8 years. Federal funding has existed for three out of six years before the SAMHSA created the new hotline network. To find ourselves in competition with a federally funded hotline - that is using funds we labored to get appropriated - is frustrating to say the least. No one is winning. Most of all, the crisis centers for whom this money was appropriated for have yet to receive any funds for the training of crisis line workers.
On March 15th 2004 I had to lay off the entire staff of the Kristin Brooks Hope Center due to interference from the prime on our grant, AAS. The NMHA (National Mental Health Association) came to our rescue and provided support staff to run the program. They additionally agreed to partner with us to apply for the current grant. Also, our partners on the grant were 9-1-1, United Way, COA and many other nationally and internationally recognizable and credible organizations. NMHA is a 100+ year old mental health advocacy organization that has been the prime on many federal grants. In other words, the applicant was more than credible and safe for the program to be operated by. We had the experience, the most recognizable number (that people dial even without knowing it really exists), the latest, most effective technology (which allowed us to react to minor and major changes (Katrina) in the country within minutes, and a staff of very efficient people who have been working in mental health for decades. To award the new grant to a novice in the suicide prevention field while the NMHA application had all the existing partners in our network lined up made little sense.
Now here comes a disturbing fact.
One month before the bidding on the grant for the "recompete of the 1-800-SUICIDE grant" closed, the now former Deputy Director of SAMSHA Jim Stone announced to a group of mental health advocates in June of 2004 that the grant was to be awarded to a "new agency". I was physically there when he said it. My colleagues turned and looked at me in big surprise. This was a major slip on his part. When I came up to him to find out more on this new entity (he didn’t know me at the time), a second before he opened his mouth to talk on the issue, the head of the conference raced up to us and introduced me to Jim Stone – “Reese Butler, founder of 1-800-SUICIDE”. Jim mumbled his way out of the conversation.
What I’m trying to say is we believe that the new grant was “awarded” long before the official results came out to the public. A search for Jim Stone and his very short history with SAMHSA resulted in several injunctions regarding contracts that were awarded by him. The competition was not fair. In addition to the predetermined statement by Stone we also read in the winning grant how they cited a review of our network and its shortcomings conducted by the SAMHSA contractor. The interesting thing is that the same report was denied to us, the very agency the two-year report was about . Finally we received a copy yet it was redacted to the point it was useless. Then after our appeals were completed they issued us a copy of the original report which was shared with the winning applicant back in 2004!
After the feds awarded the grant to MHA of NYC they asked us for a donation of our number 1-800-SUICIDE as it was now obvious that we are the losers. Never at anytime did the feds ever invite us into the discussion about transition or allow us to meet with them to work out plans to make sure that nothing from the first grant was lost or valuable components of the first grant be transferred to the new awardees. We created many software programs and a few databases all crisis centers need and to this day rely on. None were used by the new grantee as they have started from scratch to create new programs duplicating and replacing our programs.
In addition it has been stated that the grant was fairly competed and we lost. They also state that they had to compete the grant by law. This is not true. Proof is the post on the SAMHSA site where they say the applicant is being limited because Congress authorized funding for only one National Suicide Prevention Lifeline program; therefore, the program supplement must be awarded to the grantee that manages Lifeline, specifically to Link2Solutions. It would be inefficient and wasteful to fund a second national suicide prevention hotline network, which would need to develop a parallel and duplicative crisis center network and telephonic infrastructure. Also, establishing and publicizing a second toll-free telephone number would be confusing to callers.
No where in the Congressional language is the name National Suicide Prevention Lifeline mentioned (as it did not exist in 2000) yet in the Congressional testimony 1-800-SUICIDE and or the Hopeline are mentioned no less than 11 times. To read the original testimony read the Congressional Record June 28th 2000 or got to www.save1800suicide.org/record.html
As far as the 266k that is owed to our organization I have posted a compete list of the claims for all to see. The claim includes reimbursement for a conference held for crisis centers, salaries that were approved in the first year at 100% and administrative services that NMHA performed when we had to lay off our staff due to the arbitrary cuts to our payroll resulting in poor morale. We have nothing to hide and ask for our day in court. If this internet campaign does nothing more than to expedite what we have been asking for in terms of a judicial review by impartial reviewers then we will consider it a major success.
There’s an interesting fact about the number 1-800-SUICIDE. Before 1998 if you called the number, you’d reach a sex line. It was owned by a company that had a number of 1-800 lines and every one of them was a sex line. I know of at least one case when a woman called the number and killed herself because she couldn’t reach help.
After Kristin killed herself, I wanted to find a number that would be easy to remember. At first it was 1-888-SUICIDE, but then people still continued calling the 800 number. Whether it was God’s work, a stroke of luck or just my ability to negotiate, I convinced the sex line company to release 1-800-SUICIDE for the greater good.
Why didn’t our Government think of it first? If I hadn’t had that number released, who would be its owner today? Something’s telling me, it still would be a sex line and people would be committing suicide, unable to reach help.
We have developed technology that allowed us to route the calls to the first available crisis center worker. That means when Katrina happened and we found out that we lost several crisis centers in the flooded area, within minutes we had calls going to other crisis centers which immediately offered help. And people in the disaster area were the ones who called 1-800-SUICIDE more often than anywhere else.
If a crisis center director called us and said that his volunteers got sick and they couldn’t answer calls that night or if there were some phone problems, even if it the call happened late at night, I rushed to the office to reroute the calls, because a suicidal person might have called the Hopeline and would get no response.
Government employees work 9 to 5 and will hardly care enough to make necessary changes in the network that can potentially save lives. Government leaders change as do their agendas and priorities but the needs of the people remain the same every day, morning or night.
We started a number of great projects, 23 in total. One is a teen to teen peer line as we learned teenagers were often afraid to even talk to adults. We had just begun a online chat program as many teens would not call hotlines for fear that the phone number 1-800-SUICIDE will show up on their parents’ phone bill. This project was effectively killed with the end of the funding. Three years ago we were developing a hotline for veterans 877-VET2VET who were returning from war zones and were having trouble adjusting back to civilian life, suffering from PTSD and considering suicide. This project was killed as well although there’s an urgent need for it today.
I urge all of you to write your Congressional representatives and make the SAMHSA adhere to the original will of Congress led by the late Senator Paul Wellstone.
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Secondly, neither link directs me to any government release on the subject, and both are a bit unclear as to what the problem is, i.e. what exactly the government is doing. They say that we should tell the federal government not to duplicate efforts, but then essentially say that they'll go out of business, in effect making it so that no efforts are duplicated.
Then there are amorphous privacy and Bush Administration arguments brought up which are not explained at all, with no links to source material.
posted by Captaintripps at 9:35 PM on July 28, 2006